If Peaches never existed, she surely would have invented herself. In fact, that’s exactly how Merrill Beth Nisker, a 46-year-old former drama teacher from Ontario, transformed into Peaches, electroclash’s preeminent erotic provocateur/party animal. For the last 10 years, she has been transgressing the boundaries of good taste and common decency with album titles such as Impeach My Bush and trashy retrofitted ’80s dance music that advocates fornication as the palliative cure for the pain and boredom of modern existence. In the process, she has built a swelling cult of gender freaks, hipster geeks, and hypersexual misfits, all of whom […]
Win Tix To See Streetlight Manifesto On Sunday
We have a pair of tickets for some lucky Phawker reader to see Streetlight Manifesto, ball-capped avatars of Jersey third wave ska, play the Electric Factory on Sunday. Self-described as “one part rock, one part ska, with influences from Latin, klezmer, folk, world, funk, jazz and classical thrown in,” Streetlight Manifesto will help you get your ska ya-yas out.To qualify to win you need to do two things: First, follow us on Twitter. Second, send a note to Phawke66@gmail.com letting us know that you are following us on Twitter with the words TWIN TONE in the subject line. Please […]
BEING THERE: Mac DeMarco @ The Trocadero
Photo by DYLAN LONG Mac DeMarco’s spacy yet genuine personality, well-crafted slacker rock and full-on bozo performance style has led him a long way. The line to get into Mac DeMarco’s way sold out show at Trocadero Theater last night stretched down an entire block of Arch street from 10th to 11th streets and continued around the corner, studded with eager teens rocking tucked in t-shirts, five panel hats and multi-colored denim jackets. Opening act Walter TV (a project consisting of several of Mac’s own band members plus Simon Ankenman) delivered 45 minutes of strange yet enjoyable melodies punctuated by […]
ALL GOOD ZOMBIES GO TO HEAVEN: Q&A With Bassist Chris White, Songwriter, Odessey & Oracle
BY JONATHAN VALANIA A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away called the Summer Of Love, The Zombies created one the three or four baroque-pop masterpieces of the psychedelic era of the 1960s. And nobody cared. Though they had a couple hits, The Zombies were never cool like the Beatles and the Stones were cool. Their innate dorkiness probably didn’t help, though it would, years later, thanks to Wes Anderson, render them alpha males in the Land Of Twee. But still, they served with valor, bravely walking point during the British Invasion and proudly wearing the uniform: skinny […]
Win Tix To See Luna @ The Troc On Monday
While it is inarguably true that there would be no Luna — and for that matter no Galaxie 500 — without the Velvet Underground, Dean Wareham’s ’90s alt-rawk jawn was never so much a Velvet Underground cover band as it was a lovely green shoot growing out of VU’s “Pale Blue Eyes”/”Femme Fatale” side, eschewing the noise and transgression of the first two VU albums for the lyrical, languid jangling pop meditations of the last two VU albums. Poor bastards had no more commercial luck with Lou Reed’s sound cloud than Lou Reed did, which is to say none, […]
BEING THERE: Bully @ Boot & Saddle
Photo by TOM BECK If you ask me, it wasn’t until the turn of the century when Nashville really started earning it’s stripes as the country’s “Music City.” It really wasn’t until 2000 when the city started pumping out great bands that weren’t country artists. Since that time, Kings of Leon, The Dead Weather, Kopecky, Diarrhea Planet, and a slew of other bands added to the diversity of the Nashville scene, which, up until that point, was mostly just a country scene. Both Jack White and The Black Keys left their respective hometowns of Detroit and Akron, Ohio to move […]
Win Tix To See Franz Ferdinand + Sparks @ E. F.
What happens when you combine smarty/dancey-pants Glaswegian art-punks Franz Ferdinand with arch, synth-y post-glam/post-New Wave/post-whatever Los Angeleno art-rockers Sparks? The not-very-imaginatively-named FFS, a once-secret long-running collaboration that’s resulted in the eponymously-titled debut FFS, released by the way-cool Domino label back in June. (Rule of thumb, if it’s on Domino it’s worth hearing.) What’s it sound like? Arch, dance-y, cerebral, post-glam, post-New Wave, post-whatever art-rock. If that’s your idea of a good time have we got a deal for you. FFS are currently on a tour for the album that brings them to the Electric Factory on Saturday and we […]
BEING THERE: A$AP Rocky & Tyler The Creator @ Festival Pier
Photo by DYLAN LONG What do you get when you take one of the most vulgar and provocative rappers in the last 10 years and put him on a bill with one of the biggest and baddest members of Harlem’s hip hop collective A$AP Mob? The answer is quite simple: The Rocky and Tyler Tour. Several thousand fans from far and wide descended upon Philly’s Festival Pier last night to witness a mixture of well-crafted versifying, Tyler The Creator dancing like a man covered in honey and fire ants and A$AP Rocky effortlessly wooing every female in the house with […]
BEING THERE: Motorhead @ The Tower
Photo by DAN LONG Having cancelled a handful of shows earlier this month due to “altitude sickness,” it was an open question whether Lemmy would truly be back in the saddle last night at the Tower Theater. Would he bow out after two songs like he did in Austin? Would he plow through, driven by The Will To Rock (and maybe a coupla handfuls of trucker speed)? Or, would he die onstage? These were the lingering questions that hung in the air last night. On top of that, it is the opinion of many Motorhead fans that Lemmy should bow […]
Win Tix To See Yo La Tengo @ The Keswick
Artwork by ALEXIS NOLLA REVERT Time is short, the Secret Service is already telling us to pack it up and get on the slow boat to the FEMA camps, so we will cut to the chase: We are very excited to announce that we have a pair of tickets to see indie institution Yo La Tengo perform a rare acoustic show at The Keswick Theater tomorrow night. To qualify to win you need to A) sign up for our emailing list, below right of this post, underneath the masthead. Trust us, you want to be on this list. Among other […]
LOST CLASSIC: The Gun Club’s Fire Of Love
THE GUN CLUB Fire Of Love (Superior Viaduct) On the night of August 16th, 1938, as Robert Johnson lay dying, poisoned by a jar of corn whiskey laced with strychnine by the jealous boyfriend of a pretty girl Johnson was flirting with at a country dance he was playing in Greenwood, MS, he had a brief and flickering vision — of gaunt white man in a cowboy hat slumped in the backseat of a car motoring through the backwoods of West Virginia on New Year’s Day 1953. It was Hank Williams. Drifting in and out of consciousness as a […]
Win Tix To See Jesus & Mary Chain Perform PSYCHOCANDY @ Union Transfer Tomorrow Night
Hard to remember now but there was a time when the Jesus & Mary Chain divided the population of planet Earth into two camps: Those who were sure they were the Second Coming and those who thought they were the end of Western Civilization. Such was the response 30 years ago to the band’s debut, Psychocandy. History would, of course, judge it a seminal and deeply influential classic, an exploding cigar in the mouth of western civilization that just keeps giving. The Jesus & Mary Chain are currently in the midst of a U.S. tour marking the 30th anniversary […]
Win Tix To See Bad Religion Frontman Dr. Greg Graffin Ph.D Discuss His New Book @ Coda
AMAZON: From the very beginning, life on Earth has been defined by war. Today, those first wars continue to be fought around and literally inside us, influencing our individual behavior and that of civilization as a whole. War between populations-whether between different species or between rival groups of humans-is seen as an inevitable part of the evolutionary process. The popular concept of “the survival of the fittest” explains and often excuses these actions. In Population Wars, Greg Graffin points to where the mainstream view of evolutionary theory has led us astray. That misunderstanding has allowed us to justify wars […]